Saturday Matinee – Sand Castle, Whistling and Harpo Marx

Loud, piercing and sharp… a whistle is hard to ignore. But whistling languages are in danger of dying out. But residents of Kusköy on the Black Sea coast still communicate by whistling.An ee sounds higher than an ah. Consonants are distinguished by changes in pitch over different intervals of time. Eskimos communicate with whistles; so do indigenous people in the Amazon, and in Europe shepherds keep boredom at bay and communicate by whistling to each other. But the world’s 70 whistling languages are slowly becoming extinct. Kusköy in Turkey is defending the tradition.

I’m not sure if Harpo was self-taught, but I know that some items in his Wikipedia entry are contradicted by Groucho’s Autobiography. The story I recall (that means “I seem to remember but I’m too lazy to research it”): there was a dispute with a theater owner where the brothers were perfoming. Harpo was pissed, said he hoped the place burned down. It did, and Harpo vowed never to speak on stage again. I don’t know if it’s true, but I recall (again, that means “I seem to remember but I’m too lazy to research it”) that’s what Groucho claimed.